1. Field of the Invention
Example embodiments of the present invention are directed generally to systems and methods that implement virtual currencies.
2. Description of the Related Art
The following description includes information that may be useful in understanding the present invention. It is not an admission that any of the information provided herein is prior art or relevant to the presently claimed invention, or that any publication specifically or implicitly referenced is prior art.
Traditional face-to-face cash transactions may be characterized as having four attributes (1) direct transmission, (2) irreversibility, (3) price stability, and (4) functionally (or effectively) unlimited liquidity. The first attribute, direct transmission, means a transaction can be conducted without the need to interact with a bank or some other form of a central clearing authority. The second attribute, irreversibility, refers to the inability of a sender to recall a transferred instrument (e.g., cash) from a recipient after the transaction has been authorized by the sender and confirmed as having been received by the recipient.
In contrast, reversibility refers to the ability to reverse or cancel a payment as a function of the payment system, not the legal right to return defective goods or to demand refund for services or goods not provided because of the transaction itself. Consumer protections with respect to the provision of contracted wares or services are an entirely separate issue. Instead, what is referred to in this context is the ability to reverse a payment itself by virtue of the system used to provide the payment. For example, a first consumer who purchases a book with cash, and a second customer who purchases a book from the same merchant via the merchant's online bookstore using a credit card have the same contractual entitlements with respect to the provision of goods, ability to return the books, etc. However, the introduction of the financial intermediaries during the credit card transaction, in effect, provides the second customer with an additional avenue of recourse, namely transaction reversal, or “chargeback,” provided by the payment method. Unfortunately, such reversals may occur several months after the date of the transaction.
The third attribute, price stability, refers to the stability of the value of the instrument, particularly in relation to an operating currency or currencies of the recipient. The fourth attribute, functionally (or effectively) unlimited liquidity, means the instrument is marketable or sufficiently tradable (purchasable or sellable).
With the emergence of the Internet and, subsequently, the World Wide Web, merchants immediately recognized and sought to capitalize on the seemingly limitless commercial potential of virtual, remote access to global markets. As a result, such merchants and existing financial institutions sought to find ways to employ, or adapt the available financial infrastructure, to enable remote transactions over this new communication medium. Thus, ecommerce was born.
All ecommerce transactions may be characterized as being remote transactions. Thus, ecommerce cannot be conducted using traditional face-to-face cash transactions. Therefore, existing systems were adapted for use within the new, remote virtualized ecommerce environment. It is worth bearing in mind that systems in existence before the introduction of ecommerce were not designed to facilitate efficient remote transactions of this kind and on this scale. Instead, these pre-existing systems were adopted for and adapted to this use.
If ecommerce transactions are conducted in an official currency of a stable government (e.g., U.S. dollars), the transactions will have the third and fourth attributes, price stability, and functionally (or effectively) unlimited liquidity, respectively. Nevertheless, such ecommerce transactions will lack the first and second attributes, direct transmission, and irreversibility, respectively, of traditional face-to-face cash transactions because ecommerce on the Internet typically relies almost exclusively on financial intercessors (banks and financial institutions, card associations, etc.) that function as third party intermediaries (or centralized authorities) to process and clear electronic payments. Conventional ecommerce systems are predicated on trust-based systems that require these centralized authorities to validate and clear submitted transactions. Thus, conventional ecommerce transactions lack the first attribute, direct transmission.
While the existing systems function passably for many classes of transactions, from a merchant processing perspective, they suffer from fundamental constraints (and costs) inherent in the centralized, trust-based model. For example, within such systems, irreversible transactions are not possible, because the third-party financial intermediaries must mediate transactional disputes. Thus, conventional ecommerce transactions lack the second attribute, irreversibility, of traditional face-to-face cash transactions.
The interposition of these intermediaries has the effect of shifting both the practical onus of validating transactions and transaction costs that fund the intermediaries to the merchants. Such transactions costs may include per-transaction processing fees charged by intermediaries. Unfortunately, these costs erode profit margins and/or are passed on as incremental fees to potential customers. Further, intermediaries may impose systemic penalties and/or constraints. For example, third party intermediaries and associated clearance infrastructure (e.g., acquiring banks, card associations, etc.) may impose restrictions as to the nature, size, and source of transactions between a customer and the merchant. While some intermediated systems are efficient (e.g., credit cards), others can take hours or days to clear (e.g., electronic funds transfers (“EFT”), debit (“DBT”) card transactions, money wires, and the like).
Transaction reversal exposes merchants to immense incremental costs and risks, which may include direct costs associated with irretrievably lost goods, associated shipment fees in the event of fraudulent reversals, costs associated with licensing, developing, and/or maintaining systems that detect and mitigate fraud, wages of personnel required to manage internal controls and investigate, mediate or prosecute fraud, and bank and/or processor charges and reversal fees. To exacerbate matters for merchants that accept credit card payments, the acquiring facility itself may be jeopardized if chargebacks exceed specified thresholds.
There are additional problems inherent with the use of intermediaries to facilitate ecommerce transactions. For example, financial intermediaries act as de facto “gatekeepers” to ecommerce because without the ‘permission’ of such intermediaries (e.g., a bank or other processing infrastructure), conventional ecommerce cannot be conducted. Merchants are dis-incented or precluded from offering certain categories of products or from offering irreversible services due to potential payment reversal risks. Merchants must adopt aggressive know-your-customer (“KYC”) policies and a “defensive” stance with respect to their customers to provide recourse in the event of fraud, further impairing the customer experience and impeding sales conversions. As is appreciated by those of ordinary skill in the art, KYC or “know your client” protocols are due diligence practices adopted to ascertain certain information from a particular client used to establish identity and bona fides prior to doing business with that particular client. More generally, “KYC” refers to the general practice of gathering information about a potential customer to ensure the potential customer's identity (e.g., to satisfy a compliance obligation, and/or mitigate against potential future fraud). Because banks have a significant KYC regulatory burden, interposing a bank (as a financial intermediary) imposes the bank's KYC requirements on those merchants that wish to process payments through the bank.
Thus, a structural consequence of using a financial intermediary operating in a trust-based system is that merchants are compelled to absorb and accommodate unavoidable expenses, risks, and operational constraints. Even in the face of such costs and constraints, however, the opportunity that the Internet and ecommerce present to merchants is simply too enormous to ignore. Therefore, merchants have traditionally simply accepted such realities as systemically unavoidable, and resigned themselves to such losses and expenses as unavoidable “costs of doing business” online.
To address some of the problems associated with traditional ecommerce systems, alternative payment technologies and networks have been developed, such as FACEBOOK® Credits, AMAZON® Coins, traditional “e-wallets,” “e-purses,” GOOGLE® Wallet, and pre-paid debit cards. Such alternatives may be referred to as “e-money” or “virtual currency” or “e-cash.” Nonetheless, like ecommerce transactions conducted using an intermediary, each of these alternative payment technologies and networks lacks one or more of the four attributes of traditional face-to-face cash transactions.
Therefore, a need exists for methods and systems that implement a virtual currency and transactions in the digital or on-line world using that virtual currency that have the four attributes of face-to-face cash transactions. The present application provides these and other advantages as will be apparent from the following detailed description and accompanying figures.